Grinning out from beneath a military helmet, dressed in combat gear and a bullet proof vest this never-before-seen photograph shows Thomas Matthew Crooks aged nine.

Today, through a trove of pictures and the accounts of family friends, Dailymail.com can give the first real glimpse into the childhood of the boy who would grow up to try to kill a president.

He went from the ‘normal little boy’ who liked to play soldiers and miniature golf, to the increasingly disturbed young man who grew his hair long, isolated himself from friends and became plagued by mental health disturbances that led some to believe he was either bi-polar or schizophrenic.

It was a journey that ended catastrophically at Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday when Crooks, 20, took aim at the former president hitting him in the ear, killing one member of the crowd and seriously injuring two others.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one person who knows the family well said, ‘He was a cute kid, maybe a little bit off, maybe a little bit of a loner.

‘But in the past couple of years he started suffering what we all suspected was mental health issues.’

The friend, who has known the family throughout Crooks’s childhood, continued, ‘We never knew for sure if he had been diagnosed or if he was being medicated but he started growing his hair long, he withdrew. 

‘There was nothing super alarming but looking back of course you question what was missed? His father was a psychologist. 

‘I’m not blaming the parents but did he suppress something? Was there some denial there? Was there anything hidden?’

Crooks, known as Tom to his family, grew up in the Bethel Park suburb where his family still live with his parents and older sister, Katherine, 22.

He attended Abraham Lincoln Elementary School from 2009 to 2014, before moving on to Neil Armstrong Middle School 2015 to 2016, then Independence Middle School 2017 to 2018, and ultimately Bethel Park High School from which he graduated in 2022.

Seen in pictures across the years it is impossible to look at the face of the little boy who poses in yearbook picture after yearbook picture in his polo shirt and glasses without straining to see some foreshadowing of the change that, friends say, overtook him in the end.

In one, under the banner of ‘Follow your Dreams’ he is dressed in combat gear, the innocent costume of so many little boys now cast in a more sinister light by the act he would ultimately commit.

But as a child, he was, friends say, if not exactly outgoing then certainly apparently ‘normal.’

One said, ‘He was definitely very intelligent that’s something that was always clear. He was in the math club; I think that was the only club he was part of other than the gun club later, and he won quite a big scholarship for math.’

In pictures taken in elementary school he moves from the middle to the edges of the frame. 

In early photographs he is surrounded by friends, on costume days or mini-golf outings.

Later he is at the edge, peaking round a bandstand pillar or kneeling at the end of a line with a basketball and his peers.

Contrary to what one ‘friend’ has publicly claimed in recent days those who spoke with DailyMail.com insist he did not dress in hunting or camouflage gear but instead was always smartly turned out in a polo shirt and pants or shorts.

A source said, ‘He was always smartly dressed. He came from a good family – his mother is a very nice woman, and his father is actually very accomplished. I believe at one point he was earning between $300,000 and $500,000 a year.’

Today the modest family home, a small brick bungalow in a quiet suburban neighborhood sits under the watchful eyes of law enforcement and the world media.

It gives little indication of its owners having any significant wealth.

On Monday FBI agents visited the home, speaking with Crooks’s parents Matthew, 53, and Mary, 53, – both Pennsylvanian locals and both licensed counsellors – for several minutes before fanning out and moving door to door across the neighborhood.

It was here that Crooks grew up, and joined Clairton Sportsmen’s Club where he honed his rifle skills.

Speaking Monday, one friend pointed out: ‘That club is also very much a social club as well as a shooting range.’ But the friend admitted that one thing Crooks was not, was terribly social especially in later years.

They said: ‘I suspect the FBI have interrogated his parents very thoroughly to find out what if anything they knew about his state of mind. 

‘We’re just struggling to understand what happened, it’s so shocking. This is a community and for this to have happened within it…it’s almost too much to process right now. It’s going to take a long time.’

Certainly, they said, something shifted in Crooks in recent years. He appears with a smile in every school yearbook until 2020, his sophomore year and the start of the global pandemic.

After that he is absent, failing to show up for his yearbook photograph and a ghost in every group shot.

According to the friend, ‘Honestly we knew him less and less the older he got.’

But it seems he was nothing if not calculated and methodical. On Friday he went to Clairton Sportsmen’s Club shooting range and practiced firing.

The next morning, he went to a Home Depot and purchased a five-foot ladder – pictures obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com show the concealed spot where he propped this ladder against the AGR building wall allowing him access to the roof across which he scrambled to take up position.

From the Home Depot he went to a gun store, which sources have identified to DailyMail.com as Allegheny Arms & Gun Works, a five-minute drive from his family home, where he purchased 50 rounds of ammunition.

On Monday FBI agents swarmed the AGR building from which Crooks fired his shots. DailyMail.com witnessed several as they inspected the roof, at one point one dropped to his belly, lying prone as Crooks had done as he took aim and fired at Trump as he addressed the crowd.

They swept the grounds and rooted through shrubbery and trees, and they removed the ladder while questions continue to rage as to just how on earth a lone gunman managed to put it, and himself, there in the first place.

And while friends try to make sense of how a little boy morphed into a would-be assassin who killed a father of two as he protected his family and gravely wounded two others, they speculated over how long the family would remain in the community in which they have lived most of their lives.

‘The police are here now but once they leave there’s talk that they’ll have to move and that the house will be razed so it doesn’t become a target for retribution,’ said one neighbor.

Crooks was a dietary aide at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center – where he provided food and care for post-hospital elderly and sick people.

Investigators have found no threatening comments on social media accounts or ideological positions that could help explain what led him to target Trump.

Top Republicans and Democrats have demanded an urgent investigation into the shooting.